Immense and ever-increasing quantities of solid waste are generated each day. Cost of disposal ranks fourth behind schooling, highways, and general municipal expenses. Quantities of daily-accumulated waste in large cities are staggering to the imagination. It has been estimated that each individual in the U.S. generates between 4 and 6 pounds of trash per day. The trash from industrial sources is equivalent to an additional 5 to 10 pounds per person per day. Conventional methods of disposal, such as landfill and mere incineration, have become expensive, create problems of pollution, and represent a loss of values contained in the waste.
Proposals have been made for the processing of solid waste for recovery of the values therein. One feature of many such processes has been to initially shred all of the waste into fine particles which are processed by a plurality of unit operations, to segregate it into its values. The organic materials, to the extent not recovered as paper pulp, have normally been mass burned as a fuel. The problem has been that none of the processes heretofore proposed has been operative on a viable, commercial scale.
I have developed a process which is commercially viable and which is broadly adaptive to changing markets for the values contained in solid waste.